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March 26, 2020 - Rudy Giuliani
31:41
Leadership, Reflection, and the September 11 Attacks | A Rudy Giuliani Common Sense Special
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It's our purpose to bring to bear the principle of common sense and rational discussion to the issues of our day.
America was created at a time of great turmoil, tremendous disagreements, anger, hatred.
There was a book written in 1776 that guided much of the discipline of thinking and brought to us the discovery of our freedoms.
Of our God-given freedoms.
It was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written in 1776, one of the first American bestsellers, in which Thomas Paine explained by rational principles the reason why these small colonies felt the necessity to separate from the gigantic Kingdom of England and the King of England.
He explained their inherent desire for liberty, freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and he explained it in ways that were understandable to the people, to all the people, not just to the educated upper class.
Because the desire for freedom is classic.
The desire for freedom adheres in the human mind and in the human soul.
Today we face another time of turmoil and anger and very, very serious partisan division.
This is exactly the time we should consult our history.
Look at what we've done best in the past and see if we can't use some of that to help us now.
We understand that they created the greatest country in the history of the world, the greatest democracy.
A country that has taken more people out of poverty than any other country on earth.
They weren't perfect men and women, and neither are we.
But a great deal of the reason for America's constant ability to self-improve is because we're able to reason.
We're able to talk.
We're able to analyze.
We are able to apply God-given common sense.
So let's do it.
♪♪ Welcome to a special edition of Marie Giuliani's Common
Sense.
And it's a special edition because we're going to focus, and we're going to take a pause, and we're going to focus on leadership.
In the middle of a crisis like this, there's very little time to reflect.
So let's see if we can put a few minutes aside to do that.
I found that very helpful to me when I dealt with September 11 and when I dealt with Flight 800 and with West Nile virus and with anthrax.
I felt it was necessary because it gets your thoughts in order.
And I'm going to talk to you about principles of leadership.
One of the first things I did when I went home the night of September 11, after probably being in a state of shock but not recognizing it is, I went and I reached out for a book and it was a biography of Winston Churchill.
This is his first volume of his great history of the Second World War.
And when you get to the third volume, I believe, he describes the Battle of Britain.
The reason it was so important for me to read that was I said to myself, if the people of Britain could go through months and months of bombing by the Nazis, not knowing every morning whether they'd come up alive or dead when they went to bed at night with their children, and they came through it, one bombing, although catastrophic and the worst in our history, our people have to be strong enough to get through that.
And I can challenge them to be that strong.
So I mention that because It's so important that we remember that now and we put it in perspective.
This attack on us is not by an external human force.
This is an attack by a disease, by an illness that we knew nothing about just a short while ago.
And what we expect, it seems, are remedies, cures, vaccines, treatments, protocols, Enough masks, enough ventilators, enough to deal with something we didn't know was going to happen three months ago.
Now, I hold public officials to a very high standard, but it doesn't help to hold them to unrealistic standards.
By and large, they've been handling this, most of them, Including particularly the president and Governor Cuomo and, to the extent that I've observed it, Governor Newsom and some of—they've been handling it well, given what they've been dealt with.
We've had very few crises of this dimension in our history.
And we've had very few where we had no warning for it, you know, September 11 being one of them, a different kind of crisis.
So having dealt with so many different things from the flight 800 that went down on a summer night and killed all those wonderful people that we had to deal with, to the terrible West Nile virus, which the CDC refused to acknowledge was West Nile virus for about 10 days, although my health department was quite certain that it was, and I had to go ahead and take action, you know, without really the CDC saying it was OK, but I went ahead and took it, and I think we kind of cut it short as a result of that, to September 11, which
I still have a hard time discussing, to the anthrax attack that came just exactly one month after September 11.
During that period of time in my life, I developed a group of leadership principles that just fortuitously, in the months leading up to September 11, I was writing the book about it, and this is the book here.
It came out after September 11 leadership, and it contains The principles of a lifetime that I developed in handling so many different kinds of crises.
I'll read you some of the chapter headings and then I'm going to synthesize it into four.
First things first, it means having to set priorities.
Prepare relentlessly.
Everyone's accountable all the time.
Surround yourself with great people.
Reflect, then decide.
Under promise, over deliver.
Be your own man.
Weddings, discretionary funerals, mandatory.
I bet you don't know what that means.
I'll explain it later.
Stand up to bullies, organized around a purpose.
So, what I try to do in this book is to figure out what are the things that makes a leader function In crisis, and then somebody else can't function in a crisis.
And we're going through a crisis, and I want to remind you all, as you evaluate people and as you deal with your own life, I'm going to give you the four out of here that I've synthesized it to after probably giving 500 lectures on this and seminars, etc.
When you're dealing with a crisis of this magnitude, whether it's September 11 or it's Anthrax, or it's this novel coronavirus that we don't really understand yet, and it's killing people, and it seems exponentially, right?
There's going to be a practical and an emotional part of it.
It's not one or the other.
People need practical advice.
They need honest Communication.
They need to develop in the leader faith that he's telling them the truth.
At the same time, the leader has to have the sensitivity to know there's a difference between telling the truth and being brutal about it.
An example for me on September 11 was the night of September 11, where after a very, very difficult and exhausting press conference for all of us, and feeling the pain of losing 12 or 13 of my very good friends, and some quite a surprise, and giving them as much information as I possibly could, I was asked by one very fine reporter, you know, what are the casualties?
How many people are dead?
And I reflected on it, and I thought about it, and I said, I think to disclose that now would be too much for people to bear.
Now, part of it was I didn't actually know the number completely, and I had a sense that the number was exaggerated.
I would have had to have said about 6,000 at the time.
Turned out to be half that, still a horrible number.
But second, I thought that part of communicating horrible, horrific tragedies is sensitivity in doing it.
You've got to be honest, but you can't go over the line in being brutally honest.
And you can never Take the worst scenario and paint it.
Because there's always a worst scenario.
Every medicine you take, there's a possibility it'll kill you just about.
But we don't advertise that immediately.
Otherwise, people would never take medicines.
So here are the principles that I would emphasize.
And then I think we can show how they've been utilized correctly.
And in a few cases, not.
Four principles I'm going to emphasize.
They may sound a little strange at first.
You have to have a goal.
You have to have relentless preparation, you have to have courage, you have to have teamwork, and you have to communicate.
So, goal.
That sounds a little strange.
What does that mean?
Goal means you have to know where you're leading people to.
You can't lead people unless you announce a goal, because they don't know how to follow you.
You have to tell them, where are we going?
You know, Moses told the Israelites where they were going.
They were going to the Promised Land.
And they made some detours.
And they made some mistakes.
And they went through some horrific times.
But there was the goal in front of them all the time.
Let's go the extra mile.
Let's overcome the mistake that we made.
Because we have a wonderful goal, the Promised Land.
And on September 11, I had my staff remind me at the end of every press conference, always end on a positive note, and it was hard to do that.
Always end in some way reminding them we're going to get back to normal.
We're going to overcome that if the people of Britain could overcome it.
If the people of Israel can deal with these bombings every day, the people of New York have the strength to deal with this, and we can become an example.
To the rest of the country.
We can help our country get through this.
Well that's what I would say now.
I would say we're asking the American people to undergo tremendous sacrifices.
This is very, very difficult, what we're asking them to do.
their best friends and loved ones, remaining isolated in some cases for 12, 13, 14 days.
This is very, very difficult, what we're asking them to do.
But do you realize when we come through this, the strength that you're gonna have,
what you're gonna demonstrate.
You're gonna demonstrate that you're the children and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of the greatest generation that went through a five-year war, separated.
Happened to my family, with an uncle and an aunt.
Separated for five years.
He was missing for three years.
They remained in love, got married, and had a wonderful marriage and a wonderful son.
Not always turned out that way for everyone.
But, What I'm saying is, you've got it.
You've got that same strength.
I saw that September 11th.
Guy was really down when it first happened.
About 3, 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I saw all these people walking toward Ground Zero.
They all looked like construction workers.
Big guys, dirty faces.
They had some equipment and stuff like that.
I said, what are you doing here?
And they said, Mayor, we came to help.
You know, we're strong guys.
We can lift things.
And they intuitively knew that we were going to have to lift debris to find bodies.
No, not to find bodies, to find remains of people.
I tell you, they lifted my spirits immediately.
Immediately, I said.
They're the sons and daughters and grandsons and great-grandsons who won the Second World War.
And then when I saw that flag, you know, the flag on Ground Zero, God, I had to bring back Iwo Jima, right?
Same blood, same background, same fierce love of freedom and country.
That we'll withstand what we have to withstand to save our country.
And now what you have to withstand, and what I have to withstand, are these restrictions that are put on us.
Not to just be restrictions, but to try to stop what could be a catastrophic loss of life.
They make sense.
I don't like them.
But they make sense to try to flatten the curve.
And it's all a question of how we accept them.
But what I want to tell you about goal is, if we can do this, just think of how we're going to emerge with a sense of purpose about ourselves.
And that's why that goal has to be there all the time.
I said relentless preparation.
Relentless preparation, well, it had to have happened by now.
But then it has to be a goal for the future.
These states and the federal government either prepared for this or they didn't, and for 18 years I've been going around the country and the world telling people, relentless preparation, relentless preparation.
Probably have given 500 speeches about it.
I related to the judge that I was a law clerk for, Judge Lloyd F. McMahon.
He taught me, I wanted to be a trial lawyer when I was a kid, and he taught me For every one hour in court, four hours of preparation.
Go over it.
Memorize it.
Go back over it.
Ask the witness the question ten times.
Think of the thing that is going to come up that you didn't think about.
Because if you think about it first, you'll answer it better.
But then he would say, something will always come up that you didn't think about.
But if you're prepared, you'll figure out the answer to it from all that preparation you did And it'll come like that and everybody will say, wow, look at that guy.
Look how he talks on his feet.
It's not on your feet.
It's the preparation that you did before.
That was September 11.
When I got to the site and looked at the man jumping out of the window, I said to Bernie Kerik, this is beyond us.
We never encountered anything like this.
We have 25 emergency plans.
We don't have one for airplanes attacking buildings as missiles.
And as soon as I started making decisions along with him and Pete Gansey, who tragically lost his life 20 minutes later, I started saying, you know, we are prepared.
We're prepared because we did so many other preparations, because we did 10 drills and 20 tabletop exercises, and we went through blackouts, and we went through hostage situations, and we went through train derailments, and we went through airplane crashes, and we went through West Nile virus, and all the things we learned then We can apply now.
So we won't be dealing with this beyond-us crisis without experience.
The same thing is true here.
All these people, I know them best in New York.
They've been through this before.
They went through this with me, with West Nile virus.
They went through it with Mike Bloomberg, with the blackouts.
They're the best.
And it's true all throughout the country.
They know what they're doing based on preparation.
I can see Immediately when I look at the governors and the mayors, I can tell you the ones that are prepared and the ones that aren't.
I've been able to do that for 18 years.
And you know there have been a couple in which the preparation or the results were terrible, and it was in part lack of preparation.
So to Governor Cuomo and Governor Newsom and President Trump, And some others, although I've seen those three the most, you have my respect, and you have my admiration, and for whatever it's worth, you get an A+, because you're prepared.
And I can see it, and I can see it in the way you're handling it.
It's obvious this isn't your first rodeo.
This is the first time you've had to deal with something like this, but you've taken all the principles that you learned over a lifetime, and you're applying it well.
And it's clear.
And what I say to other leaders who haven't, there'll be more crises.
Take this as a lesson now and do the preparation that's necessary.
Relentless preparation.
Judge McMahon, four hours for everyone.
Courage.
Don't be afraid of taking a risk.
Responsible risk, but risk.
This is a thing that's never hit us before.
This is a thing we've never dealt with before, like September 11.
There's no book that has the answer to this, because it didn't happen before.
Nobody has all the answers.
Not the best politician, not the best law enforcement person, not the brightest doctor.
Anybody who thinks they have the answers to this is too arrogant to be involved in it.
This is trial and error.
Gotta have the courage to make decisions.
I'm gonna give you one example of great courage.
You'll think it's strange, but it's when President Trump said, we gotta try hydroxyquinolone.
We gotta give it a try.
Man, that takes a lot of courage to do that.
I mean, the FDA would have wanted 45,000 tests and, you know, what they usually put us through, which they should, I guess, although I do think it's somewhat excessive, and occasionally lives are lost.
Go look at Wall Street Journal editorials if you think I'm being a little bit excessive here, but I do think it's a problem.
But in a situation like this, we don't have time.
Lots of people are going to be dead unless we move at lightning speed.
There's no time for all the bureaucratic A, B, C, D, E, F, G, fill out this form, fill out that form.
Oh, one more test.
My goodness, people are dying!
If we have something that looks like it's gonna work, we can reduce the risk.
Let's go with it.
Now, do you know what President Trump doing that did?
I've talked to so many doctors.
He released an energy from these doctors.
That in the last couple of days, I've heard of three possibilities of how we can deal with this that could be very effective.
They may not be, but this is how we accomplish things in America— competition.
And thank God we've got a president who understands that and has the courage to be criticized like he was criticized for cutting off China.
He was called a xenophobe by his opponents.
Had he not done that, who knows what the numbers would be today.
It took courage to do that.
It took even more courage to embrace a therapy that the FDA, acting as the Pope, hasn't, you know, blessed.
I'm not saying we should take unnecessary risk.
Please don't misinterpret that.
What I'm saying is, in a situation like this, we have to take responsible risk.
And we have to unleash the creativity of American doctors and scientists.
And I have to tell you, to the doctors who labor under a lot of these restrictions, it was electrifying when the president did that.
Thank you, Mr. President.
for doing it.
That's what I mean by courage.
Teamwork.
Teamwork means you can't do it alone.
I couldn't do September 11 alone.
Every time people praised me for it.
When the Queen of England gave me an honorary knighthood, I said to the Queen of England, you're touching my shoulder, but I rested on the shoulders of giants.
They did it.
And luckily she gave an honorary When I see President Trump and I see Governor Cuomo with all those people behind him, I say that's good leadership.
it was their men and women, plus all the others that got me through it.
I'm not foolish enough to think I did it all by myself. I didn't.
When I see President Trump and I see Governor Cuomo, with all those people behind him,
I say that's good leadership. I say that's teamwork.
That's showing and that is displaying. It's more than just a visual.
That's displaying to the American people, I understand I'm not doing this alone.
I understand it's Dr. Fauci and all these other people that are here with me.
We're going to work this out together.
We've got to work it out together.
Those people have to be given, you know, responsibility to make decisions.
I see that with Governor Cuomo.
I must say, with my one bit of criticism, I haven't seen that with the mayor.
I see the mayor, de Blasio, sitting at a desk all by himself, a person which is, quite correctly, doing a sign for people who are hard of hearing.
But I don't see the police commissioner, I don't see the health commissioner.
By the way, the best department of health in the country?
Is it fully engaged when the mayor seems to be out of the loop?
I mean, that health department is the equal of the CDC.
Don't get angry at the CDC.
But they picked up West Nile virus.
You didn't.
They know the streets of my city.
Like my police officers know the streets of my city.
Don't overlook them.
You may have the academic knowledge.
They've seen West Nile virus before.
You didn't.
You gotta figure that all in.
That's part of teamwork.
Which the president and Governor Cuomo have done magnificently!
What a great example!
Republican, Democrat, both from New York.
Problems, investigations, all kinds of things!
And they're working together because the American people are more important than all those divisions.
And then we got a couple, I won't mention them, that are trying to politicize this, trying to get money for abortions!
Aren't you ashamed of yourself?
Stop it!
There's still time to—let's get the spirit of 9-11 back.
Let's—we're all, you know, we're all subject to being killed by this, not just Democrats and Republicans.
75 years old?
I'm in that class of, you know, more likely than some other people.
But so is everybody, so let's work together.
What does it cost us to work together?
When it's over, we can all go fight about taxes again, okay?
Plenty of time to fight.
This is the time where great Americans, who are going to mean something in history, stand up, and their country comes first, and they don't even give a damn about their party.
It's the country that comes first, and the people of this country.
And the final one is communication.
You have to communicate The leader has to be there, has to talk.
I heard people say, oh, the president shouldn't be talking, the scientists should be talking, or—they didn't say that Governor Cuomo shouldn't be talking, but—because he's a Democrat, but—oh, excuse me, I didn't mean to say that.
But, I mean, they would mean the same thing.
No, no, no, no.
The people elected Donald Trump.
The people elected.
Andrew Cuomo.
The people elected Gavin Newsom.
The people can hold them accountable.
People didn't elect the scientists and the doctors, and they can't hold them accountable.
They can go do anything they want.
This is how a democracy works.
We need the leaders to step forward.
And if they can't lead, then defer.
I'm going to tell you one other thing I want to see.
I want to see the mayor of New York and the governor of New York sitting together.
As soon as we could after the attack of September 11, after I was trapped in a building for a while, finally got out, called Governor Pataki right away.
The governor said, thank God you're alive, because I was missing and he thought we were lost.
And he was already making plans for doing what he should have to do, which is to take over the city.
Which Governor Cuomo has virtually done in the absence of the mayor for such a long period of time.
He's finally in it, kind of.
But the first thing we decided was, we're going to be together.
We're going to hold our staff meetings together every day.
Three times a day at first.
Two times a day.
Once a day for two and a half, three months.
That meant he came down from Albany.
He'd have a staff meeting every morning.
I'd have one every morning.
Our staff sat together.
We did that for two or three days.
And then the president of the United States took his guy, head of FEMA, Joe Alba.
Joe reported back to him, no reason for us to take over.
These guys are in control.
I want to work with them.
And he sat at the table with us.
So there there was the— Federal guy, the state guy, and the city guy.
And when we needed to make a decision, before we left that room, the decision was made and executed.
I didn't have to send 20 forms to Albany, and they have to send 20 forms to Washington.
And then if something went wrong, my staff didn't blame his staff, and his staff didn't blame my staff, because we all got blamed.
And a few things did get wrong, and we did get blamed.
And a lot of things went right, and we got praised.
Together.
I can tell you, I've seen other things.
I don't want to mention Katrina, but I will.
The moment I saw the mayor of New Orleans on a boat somewhere, and the governor in Baton Rouge, before I even got to where the head of FEMA was, I said, this is not going to work.
Not gonna work.
If they're fighting, there's nothing the federal government can do.
The major responsibility for something like this is with the state and local government.
Federal government can be enormously helpful with the boat that they're bringing up here, with all those beds, with money, with National Guard, with law enforcement help, with help for people that are out of work.
This package that's being put together is on the dimension of what Roosevelt did during the Depression.
They're really important.
I'm not saying the federal government doesn't have a key role, but the actual connection with the people of my city comes through the mayor.
That's going to be true in Chicago and in Boston, and they've got to step up, and they've got to be there, and they've got to be on the same page as the governor.
They've got to be together making decisions.
We can't have a situation in which the mayor speculates, you know, we're going to lock everybody in, and the governor says, well, that's my decision, you know, I don't see that.
We can't have a situation in which the mayor Says, oh, you know, this is going to go on for X amount of time, and then there's going to be a really excessive, terrible recession or depression.
Maybe if he was with the governor who's got more political experience and possibly a little bit more wisdom, the governor would have said, better not to say that.
You know, yeah, we all know there's going to be economic hardship, but actually, it is possible.
It's just as possible that we could have a heck of a recovery.
Isn't that what we want?
And I don't want to predict a recovery like that.
I don't want to give you false hope.
But I don't have to give you false depression either.
That's what makes a leader, knowing the balance between those things.
I hope these principles were valuable in guiding your own behavior as well because they can only do so much for you.
You have to do it for yourselves.
These principles apply personally.
So you have to have a goal.
And your goal has to be getting yourself and your family through this and starting to think about what you want to do with the rest of your life.
How are you going to put it back?
This isn't the end of your life.
This is a chapter.
This is a chapter from which you're going to learn a lot.
Time to reassess.
There's going to be help there.
The president is sincere about wanting to help you.
The government's sincere.
The governor is sincere.
I'm sure the mayor is sincere also about it.
They're there to help you, and they are going to help you.
But you start thinking about what you want to do now.
How do you want to reconstruct this?
How do you want this to be a lesson for your children?
So, like, my parents came through the Depression.
Boy, were they strong!
And I was sure stronger for the things that I got through.
And your children, you know, we always thought maybe this generation was having it too easy.
Well, they're not having it too easy now.
And they can learn from this, and you can teach them from this.
There's a lot to be gained here, and you can go back maybe, this isn't my role, but look, I'm a human being too, you can go back and have faith in God.
You know, pray, ask for help.
He'll help us.
He gave us our rights.
After all, our constitutional rights come from God.
We trust in Him in every courtroom in America.
In God we trust.
So let's trust in Him.
He's been good to this country.
It is a special country.
It's a special country because it wants to do good for people.
It's not a special country because we want to be arrogant and we want to be, oh, we're better than you are.
We're a special country with special responsibilities.
And one of those responsibilities is to give the world the example of how a country blessed as we are, given what we've been given, can withstand difficulty.
We're going to do it.
We're going to get through it.
And I will be back with another regular episode of common sense very shortly, but I thought we'd take this little pause just to reflect on some of the broader principles.
I hope it's been helpful.
And we will continue to focus on both the practical, the emotional, the spiritual, and then ultimately what's going to happen when we get through this, because I am firmly convinced that this is going to make this country greater than it's even ever been before.
Thank you very much.
God bless you.
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